Route 53 Routing Policies
Learn about the different routing policies for Route 53.
Routing policies#
Routing policies determine how Route 53 responds to queries. The following table highlights the key function of each type of routing policy:
| Policy | What it Does |
|---|---|
| Simple | Simple DNS response providing the IP address associated with a name |
| Failover | If the primary is down (based on health checks), routes to secondary destination |
| Geolocation | Uses the geographic location you’re in (e.g., Europe) to route you to the closest region |
| Geo-proximity | Routes you to the closest region within a geographic area |
| Latency | Directs you based on the lowest latency route to resources |
| Multivalue answer | Returns several IP addresses and functions as a basic load balancer |
| Weighted | Uses the relative weights assigned to resources to determine which one to route to |
Simple routing policy#
- An A record is associated with one or more IP addresses.
- It uses round-robin.
- It does not support health checks.
The following diagram depicts an Amazon Route 53 Simple routing policy configuration:
Failover routing policy#
- Failover to a secondary IP address
- Associated with a health check
- Used for active-passive
- Routes only when the resource is healthy.
- Can be used with ELB
- When used with Alias records, set Evaluate Target Health to “Yes” and do not use health checks.
The following diagram depicts an Amazon Route 53 Failover routing policy configuration:
Geo-location routing policy#
- The geolocation routing policy caters to different users in different countries and different languages.
- It contains users within a particular geography and offers them a customized version of the workload based on their specific needs.
- Geolocation can be used for localizing content and presenting some or all of your website in your users’ language.
- It can also protect distribution rights.
- It can be used for spreading the load evenly between regions.
- If you have multiple records for overlapping regions, Route 53 will route to the smallest geographic region.
- You can create a default record for IP addresses that do not map to a geographic location.
The following diagram depicts an Amazon Route 53 Geolocation routing policy configuration:
Geo-proximity routing policy#
- Requires Route Flow
- Used for routing traffic based on the location of resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another
Latency based routing policy#
- AWS maintains a database of latency from different parts of the world.
- It is focused on improving performance by routing to the region with the lowest latency.
- You create latency records for your resources in multiple EC2 locations.
The following diagram depicts an Amazon Route 53 Latency based routing policy configuration:
Multi-value answer routing policy#
- Used for responding to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random
The following diagram depicts an Amazon Route 53 Multivalue routing policy configuration:
Weighted routing policy#
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The weighted routing policy is similar to simple with the exception that you can specify a weight per IP address.
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You create records that have the same name and type, and assign each record a relative weight.
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You can define numerical value that favors one IP over another.
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To stop sending traffic to a resource, you can change the weight of the record to 0.
The following diagram depicts an Amazon Route 53 Weighted routing policy configuration:
DNS Records with Route 53
Route 53 Traffic Flow, Resolver, and Charges